thoughts, links, and comments for an interesting retirement

Monthly Archives: June 2017

This weekend we crossed two more off the list – Hotel Winneshiek and Hotel Julien. We stayed at the Historic Park Inn Hotel in Mason City a few years ago. So that makes three (four if they had included the Continental in Centerville). Some pictures of the Hotel Winneshiek below.

What’s even more interesting about rapamycin, however, is its reputation as the most consistent way to postpone death, at least in laboratory species. It lengthens the lives of flies, worms, and rodents, too. Feed the compound to mice and they live 25 percent longer, on average.

I crave Naples the way I occasionally crave a very specific type of food: Intensely, completely, and then – in exactly the same way as when I allow myself to indulge in inadvisably large quantities of something like sushi or Indian food – not at all for a relatively significant length of time, until one day I wake up again and think: You know what I need? I need a pizza, eaten in the city where it was invented, and I need a dose of that in-your-face, brazen chaos that only Naples can properly deliver.

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Naples, on the other hand, makes you work for its best bits. It doesn’t care if you love it or not, and so it holds its beauty close, tucking it away behind someone’s private gate or around a particularly grungy-looking corner, surprising you when you least expect it.

To casual visitors, this colonial town in southern Ecuador looks like it was torn from the pages of history. With its cobbled streets, soaring cathedrals and bustling markets, it exudes a lazy, old world charm.

But Cuenca is also on the cutting edge of a very modern trend: providing a safe haven for U.S. retirees who have found themselves unwilling — or unable — to live out their golden years at home.

The growing wave of ex-pat seniors is not only upending notions about retirement in the hemisphere but reshaping the face of communities throughout the Americas. And the trend is expected to grow as waves of baby boomers exit the workforce ill-prepared for retirement.

There’s no accurate way to measure the phenomenon, but the Social Security Administration was sending payments to 380,000 retired U.S. workers living abroad in 2014 — up 50 percent from a decade ago.

When you finally take a well-deserved trip, the last thing you want to concern yourself is bed bugs. But even the finest hotels can have them. The hitchhiking pests travel to new places by way of both humans and their belongings. When they find a new home, they look for places to hide, such as mattresses, headboards, couches and chairs …

The findings, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, are in line with new guidelines for treating back pain from the American College of Physicians. The group recommends that people with back pain should avoid pain medicines if possible, and instead opt for alternatives such as tai chi, yoga and massage …

The jarWife and I try to do yoga at home, but the jarDog likes to get on the floor with us and usually just licks our faces.

When I retired last fall at 52, I thought I knew exactly what retirement would be like. Many of the expectations I had did come true, but there were several surprises as well.

Today I’ll share my revelations in hopes those of you considering early retirement might be better prepared for it.

tl;dr
Mondays became the best day of the week
My colleagues can’t accept I’m retired
I’m busier than ever
I’m in the best physical shape of my life
I’ve gotten very comfortable wearing casual clothes
My family relationships are much better
I’m learning and growing more than ever
I can’t go back to work anymore
The stress is gone
I’ve turned into a morning person

Last week we got a reminder of just how volatile the stock market can be, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged more than 370 points, or 1.8%, in a single day on political turmoil in Washington. The stock market has already recovered from that setback. But at some point, though we don’t know when, this aging bull market will give way to a bear …